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Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (Yokohama Shopping Diary) is a Japanese manga in the unexpected form of a post apocalyptic pastoral. It runs to 14 volumes, something less than 3000 pages, and contains some of the finest art and story telling I've ever seen in comic form in any language.

This series is hard to describe or categorize in western terms. It almost seems plotless at times. Some episodes are like a genre painting come to life; simply watching someone make coffee for 10 pages or walking through a long tunnel in the dark. Bits and pieces of past events and history are alluded to and we meet many interesting and ordinary people. There are no great in-story tragedies, though there are a couple of bad storms. Over time a lot of questions are asked, and many mysteries are posed, but there's no fuss about finding answers or revelations.

There are some excellent road trips, though, and the view is often breathtaking; the art does not fail to deliver some exquisite scenery.

The literary tradition in Japanese that this story seems to fit into is called Mono no aware, which Wikipedia describes as:

Mono no aware (物の哀れ mono no aware?, literally "the pathos of things"), also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of impermanence (Jap. 無常 mujō), or the transience of things, and a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing.

The closest thing in western literature that I can compare this to, from my own reading, are some of the short stories in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

There's a very large cast, and it's easy to fall in love with the characters; there are no bad guys. They vary from simple folksy types to enigmatic sphinxes. Over the years the story takes place the reader gets to peek into the lives of various old people, complacent robots, children, curious robots, mythological creatures, and robots on the make.

Alpha, the main character, and robot proprietress of Cafe Alpha, likes to gossip, take pictures with her camera, ride around the country side on her motor scooter, and occasionally engage in a little target practice with her electric pistol. Ojisan, a friendly old gaffer, runs the local gas station and helps to raise the small community's two children, Takahiro and Makki, who we watch grow up over the course of the series. Sensei, an elderly professional woman, and Ojisan's old biking buddy, runs the local hospital, but was once involved in a great research project. Kokone, a robot delivery girl, and Alpha's closest friend, wonders where she and her sister robots came from; no one has bothered to remember much about their origins. Ayase, a young man who travels with a begoggled creature that seems to be a cross between a flying fish and a hunting falcon, lives off the land, and sea, while he networks with other philosopher itinerants.

And then there's the mysterious Misago, but I'm not going to talk about her…

The world is familiar to us in many details, but clearly the setting is just after humanity's epoch as the center of things. The time is placed years, or maybe a generation or two, after some great disaster or disasters; Mt. Fuji is casually depicted with half its signature profile missing. The climate is warm, the ocean is claiming higher and higher ground, and the human population is dwindling. Signs of human habitation are crumbling away, but natural, organic memorials to humanity and its artifacts seem to popping up here and there.

It's a pleasant, peaceful decay that permeates civilization. Things have fallen apart, but, somehow, the center has held. In the prologue the long lived Alpha, on a shopping trip from her village to Yokohama to buy coffee, describes it like this:

Yesteryear's great city of Yokohama seems like a dream. Now it is a town of people where time flows gently. The world has changed greatly over these years. This gentle calm and quiet is the twilight of an era. I will probably watch the passing of this twilit age.

The stories in the series will occasionally make you laugh or cry, more often, though, the effect is much more subtle. And at the end you will feel as old, and quiet as the hills. Nothing in any religion has ever made me as accepting and at peace with the notion of mortality as this manga series.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō has never been officially translated into English. There are a couple of informal translations, or scanlations. The one I prefer is an anonymous one with a whimsical, lyrical literary style that appeared on a now defunct website and simply credited to "the elves".

There are also a couple of two episode OVAs, four episodes total, that came out in the late '90s and early 2000s. The OVAs are generally well done, and were in fact my introduction to the series. They offer only a glimpse into the greater story, but are very much worth watching. The first is better animated, in my opinion, but the second one is quite good despite a small amount of odd fan service in the first episode. The scene of Alpha serenely playing her gekkin, a chinese stringed instrument, after the storm is one of the most moving scenes I've seen in an animated film.

I loved this one. I still remember that beautiful set of panels near the beginning of the series where the wind stops blowing over the water and--for just a moment--you can see the city submerged beneath.